Loppan Torkel said:
I think this is why people are reluctant to research the Goths' origin - other call them Nazis when they find some connections to a place. Better to bury this question for the greater good..
That's rather wrong. There's a great deal of research on the origins of the Goths; see for instance Peter Heather. The problem is that there's no real reason, in this case, to suppose that the Goths migrated in to the borders of the Roman Empire en-mass. Our best sources Ammianus Marcellinus or Zosimus make no mention of the matter and what 'evidence' we have comes from a single, late and
frankly flawed source Jordanes. The problems with Jordanes are myriad. For instance he tells us in the preface that his work is a summary of an earlier multi-volume work by Cassiodorus, which isn't a bad thing in of itself, until he tells us that he had access to the parent work for a grand total of
three days. Other issues include the outright invention of a line of Gothic monarchs stretching back into eternity; the problem being that his list conflicts at times with the works of Marcellinus for instance and moreover is
prima facie insane. This of course makes sense if we consider that Jordanes wasn't necessarily writing a historical work in the truest sense of the word and was constrained by his access to source material; accordingly he innovated, invented and outright lied when it suited him, which is what lots of classical scholars did - witness Marcellinus' fellating of Julian the Apostate - but it does make life
rather hard when he's our sole source of information. The reasonable position in light of this is to be sceptical of Jordanes reliability at all times unless we can find some backing for his claims in another source. And since we can't in this matter, there's no reason to suppose that's he right.
Loppan Torkel said:
What does "single people" mean to you? What meaning do the terms "the Celts", "the Romans" and "the Goths" have to you? To me they're large enough groups of people in history that show similar cultural identity, language and cohesiveness to separate them from the neighboring peoples. There are some benefits in being able to generalize and group similar characteristics together..
That's all well and good. But we don't know all that much about what a Goth looked like let alone how a Goth thought of themselves. What archaeological evidence we have is rather hard to pin down on a single group; and even assuming that a given cemetery is a 'Gothic' one we have a rather heterogeneous mixture of burial practices and funerary goods to contend with. This is assuming of course that burial practices and funerary goods meant all that much to the people living; its traditional to be buried in a suit in the Antipodes, that doesn't mean that we all wore suits during the day. There's an old working class joke here with a punchline that goes something like this: the only time a man should wear a suit and have clean hands was when he was laid out in state. You could wear a suit at the wedding but since a man needs to work there's not much hope of him having clean hands for it. To my mind, this makes it hard, if not impossible, to have a concrete picture of what the 'Goths' were.
Really, though the important point is that you've chosen to group the 'Goths' together on the basis of linkages we aren't even sure about. In doing so, you've done what the Romans themselves did. They would look from the outside, at things like dress and language, and decide on the basis of these that a 'people' existed. This new 'people' would then be enrolled in patronage relationships, be held accountable for the actions of the other members of their 'people' and so forth. There no reason to suppose that these divisions reflected necessarily reflected an accurate socio-political portrait of the frontiers, it seems likely that the Romans on balance weren't all that much given to caring. So they might put stock in a given accoutrement of dress and give that special significance, a significance which the people themselves might never have thought of or considered all that significant as an identity marker.
What was important was that frontier relations were well managed and that the risk of eruptions was minimised. Over time these new symbols of 'peopleness' would gain significance as the Romans used them to determine who was eligible to tap what pot of patronage. Moreover competing for the same pot would of necessity force groups together that hadn't necessary had much to do with each other before. As time went on these relationships would be formalised, probably as a result of some sub-group being capable of capturing and then distributing the patronage to the others, this would increase the cohesiveness of the group and give it a very real significance as a social and political level. This is the same process we find in places like Burma, where the colonial authorities created 'people' out of thin air as a means of facilitating the distribution of patronage, holding heterogeneous groups to account and for ease of administration. That's how we end up with groups like the sub-divisions of the Hmong and frankly the Hmong because it's fairly clear that the Hmong didn't think of themselves in either terms.
